About

I grew up in a small village directly adjacent to the city of Hamburg, Germany. In the fall of 2011, I began studying Social Sciences at the Justus-Liebig University Gießen. During my studies, I worked as a student assistant at the Chair of Comparative Politics and as a statistics tutor at the Chair of International Comparative Social Research Methods. After completing my Bachelor's degree in 2014, I enrolled in the master's program in Political Science at the University of Mannheim where my coursework focused on quantitative methods and comparative politics. I also worked as a student assistant at the Chair of Political Economy and participated in the EITM Europe Summer School. After my graduation in 2016, I joined the Center for Doctoral Studies in Social and Behavioral Sciences (CDSS) and became a doctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 884.

My research focuses on advanced quantitative methods, particularly Bayesian statistics, latent variable models, and parametric and semiparametric spatial econometric techniques. Using observational data and stochastic simulations, I study the consequences of different methodological problems associated with the application of spatial regression models for substantive inferences regarding social science theories and develop different methodological improvements. Furthermore, I am also doing research on party competition, party politics, and legislative decision-making. Besides other things, I investigate diffusion and learning processes among parties within and across the different European multiparty systems and how these processes lead to endogenously evolving dynamics of party competition.

Throughout my employment at the SFB 884, I design and implement different survey experiments in the German Internet Panel (GIP) in order to study public perceptions of democratic decision-making and how different questioning techniques can improve prevalence estimates of sensitive traits at the aggregate level. I am also a member of the Mannheim Corona Study research team. By providing information on the consequences of the global corona pandemic and the impacts of the far-reaching policy measures designed to contain the spread of the virus on the German population, our results are utilized by several federal governmental agencies, including the joint crisis management team of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (Bundesministerium des Inneren, BMI), the Federal Ministry of Health (Bundesministerium für Gesundheit, BMG), and the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Soziales, BMAS) as well as the Federal Institute for Population Research (Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung, BiB).